Cloudcherry aims to help brands to catch up to meet changing customer expectations
Picture this. You’ve ordered a watch online and it’s been more than a week since you’ve received any details. There are no tracking details to fall back on, emails, phone calls, or even a message. The end result is frustration and annoyance. In today’s crowded ecosystem, it is customer experience, and not just product, price or USP that makes or breaks a brand.
However, with increasing expectations and ever-evolving consumer needs, one of the biggest challenges most organisations face is keeping up with these changing needs and meeting every expectation.
It is to fill this lacuna that Cloudcherry was born. It provides brands with a real-time, omni-channel SaaS-based customer experience management platform that helps brands track, measure, and improve customer delight.
A fast-growing world
We live in an age where customers use social media, and rating and review sites to voice their opinions and experiences. Most brands are still focussed on rather archaic and redundant methods of collecting feedback.
Vinod Muthukrishnan, Founder, Cloudcherry, realised that brands deserved to hear from their customers directly. On the other hand, customers who wanted to be heard should be able to talk directly to the brand. This, he felt, needed to happen in an efficient way.
The eureka moment really came when he began thinking, ‘What if we created a platform that brings customer experience closer to brand owners and managers in real-time, and makes the process ultra-efficient and authentic?’
Vinod’s early career was spent at sea, as a Certified First Officer with the Maersk Line. During one of his breaks, he met the team at Market Simplified and ended up joining them as part of the core team, handling global sales and partnerships. But, it was the need to start up again that drove Vinod to build Cloudcherry.
Bringing in the key differentiator
Today, Cloudcherry is used by several customer-facing brands to measure several key metrics with the Net Promoter Score and the Cloudcherry Customer Delight Score. They leverage these tools to discover actionable insights for customer experience improvement and to address issues as they happen at any touch point of interaction with the customer.
What sets them apart, according to Vinod, is the fact that they give a brand round-the-clock real-time data, metrics and analytics about their customers via a simple and easily usable platform.
“We are a click-configure-deploy product. In less than 30 minutes, a brand can go live across their entire global network of touch points,” says Vinod.
Vinod adds that customer interactions happen with the brand on a daily basis via Cloudcherry. He says these interactions happen across multiple channels, at multiple points of time.
“As a brand, it’s extremely important to understand the customer’s experience during these interactions and to capture key data insights for improvement. This is what Cloudcherry helps to do,” adds Vinod.
The workings
A brand can deploy the product in less than 30 minutes across various channels like tablets in stores, smart phones, email, SMS, QR codes, IVRS and websites to capture experiential data. This data then flows into a single, centralised dashboard with insights and analytics.
Everything happens in real-time, be it data collection, issue re-dressal notifications or data analytics and helps a brand to stay on top of customer needs non-stop and round-the-clock.
Being a SaaS-based product, Cloudcherry work on a simple monthly subscription model with no setup implementations or upfront fees.
Post the launch of the alpha version, during which time the team established a clear product-market fit, the product went live early this year. Since then, they claim that 40 brands have signed up with Cloudcherry, with over 700 points of presence that aim to process over a million interactions by the end of this year.
The internal team workings
They have also seen a 20 per cent increase month-on-month in feedback collected and points of presence over the last six months.
“Bringing together a varied team towards a common mission is a challenge in itself, but we were lucky to get a great founding team who are passionate and truly believe in the value our product offers,” adds Vinod
The core team comprises Nagendra, who was Vinod’s co-founder in his previous startup; Vijay, who was key to the conceptualisation of the product; and Prem, who handles marketing and is a close friend of Vinod. Analytics and Market Research is handled by Vidya, who connected with the team through the early investors.
The team believes in running a very lean startup model. The initial funds came from angel investors, as well as support from family and friends.
With their early success and traction, the team was able to raise a seed round of $1 million from IDG Ventures India and The Chennai Angels. They also have a strategic investment from Capillary Technologies, whose product is the one that they are integrating with.
The team aims to cement themselves as a market leader in India, especially in the retail and BFSI sectors. They plan to expand their global presence with a focus on South East Asia Enterprises, and SMEs in the US in a DIY model. “We aim to make customer experience synonymous with Cloudcherry and establish ourselves as the experts,” says Vinod.